The End(s) of Historical Criticism

What developed in
the mid-eighteenth century was not a new awareness of the “human”
or “historical” character of the Bible. Rather, it was
the realization that the Bible was no longer intelligible as
scripture, that is, as a self-authorizing, unifying authority in
European culture. Its only meanings were confessional meanings:
Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed.

The
term “historical criticism” is problematic. On the one
hand, it designates a very specific set of practices for ascertaining
the date and origin of a text or document—practices closely
associated with Renaissance humanism and the study of law, classics,
and literature. But when we refer to “historical criticism”
in the context of theology and biblical scholarship, we usually mean
something else. We use the term “historical criticism” as
an umbrella term, one that is synonymous with modern
biblical criticism
or the dominant mode of academic biblical scholarship in the West
over the past two hundred years. The reasons for this are not hard to
surmise. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
historical backgrounds of the Bible, whether accessed through
philology, textual criticism, archaeology, or source criticism, stood
at the center of scholarly efforts to make sense of the Bible.
Nevertheless, it is a mistake to identify modern biblical criticism
with historical criticism because this equation misrepresents
biblical scholarship and derails effective discussion of its
connections to non-academic interpretive modes.

Historical
questions about the Bible, important as they have been, do not bring
us to the core of what modern biblical scholarship is or has been.
Despite what conservative fundamentalists and liberal fundamentalists
have said in the past about the high theological stakes of historical
research, the central concern of modern scholarship is not history.
The issue turns not on the historicistic intellectual program that
animated modern scholarship in the nineteenth and first half of the
twentieth centuries but rather on the cultural character of modern
criticism as an institutional outgrowth of the progressive German
Enlightenment. As the eighteenth-century roots of modern scholarship
show, the real point of separation between modern biblical criticism
and the confessional modes it was designed to replace is not an
intellectual evaluation of what history says the Bible is
but a political and cultural orientation toward the question of what
the Bible is
for.

A
brief look at the origins of modern criticism bears this out. One
must be careful to avoid the genetic fallacy here since something as
complex as modern biblical criticism surely cannot be judged solely
according to what it was when it began. Yet we are now in a position
to see that modern scholarship, chastened by late- and post-modern
criticisms of historical positivism, owes a great deal more to its
eighteenth-century roots than its nineteenth-century stem. The point
is that biblical studies—long identified with historical
criticism—survives today as a discipline even though skepticism
about the veracity and value of historical knowledge itself has
become an accepted feature of our disciplinary discourse. Because we
are living in the twilight of historical criticism, we are able to
discern its purpose with clarity and objectivity. As Hegel reminds
us, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.

From
Scripture to Text

For over a
millennium, Western Christians read and revered the Christian Bible
as Scripture, as an anthology of unified, authoritative writings
belonging to the Church. The scriptural Bible was neither reducible
to a written “text” nor intelligible outside a divine
economy of meaning. It was not simply the foundation of the Church’s
academic theology; it also furnished its moral universe, framed its
philosophic inquiries, and fitted out its liturgies. It provided the
materials for thought, expression, and action, becoming what Northrop
Frye famously called the “great code” of Western
civilization.1
As the book at the center of Western Christendom, the Bible
functioned scripturally.

However, in the
wake of the traumatic religious divisions of the sixteenth century,
the fractured Church ceased to be a unified body capable of
maintaining a coherent claim on the Bible as its Bible.
Because both Roman Catholics and Protestants claimed the Bible, in
different ways, as their own, the Bible could no longer function
unproblematically as Scripture. Its nature and authority had to be
explicated and legitimated with reference to extra-scriptural
concepts, whether juridically, as among Catholics, or doctrinally, as
among Protestants.

Over the course of
the post-Reformational controversies, the Bible showed itself to be a
contested legacy for Western Christians, ultimately devolving into a
multiplicity of bibles with distinct canons, separate ecclesial
contexts, and prolific theological superstructures. What had
functioned centrally in the life of the Church became, in the early
modern period, a kind of textual proving ground for the legitimacy of
extra-scriptural theoretical understandings: at first theological and
polemical and then, over time, literary, philosophical, and cultural.
As a text, an object of critical analysis, the Bible came into
clearer focus; however, as Scripture, the Bible became increasingly
opaque.

The Eighteenth
Century

It took time and a
set of conducive circumstances for the full import of this
transformation to become evident. The development of biblical studies
as an academic discipline in Germany more than two hundred years
after the Reformation was an outworking of what might be called the
“death of scripture” in the West. The works of Spinoza,
Hobbes, Simon and others bear witness to the fact that the kinds of
philological, critical, and historical analyses of the Bible
associated with modern biblical studies were already well attested by
the latter part of the seventeenth century. What is not well
understood is why these did not give rise to an organized,
institutional, and methodologically self-conscious critical program
until the late eighteenth century.

It was not simply
deep curiosity about the language, form, and content of the Bible
that spawned the ambitious research programs of eighteenth-century
biblical scholars. In the decades surrounding the turn of the
eighteenth century, the prestige of the Bible in the Western world
was at an all-time low. Skeptics, rationalist critics, and proponents
of the new science published widely and influentially on the state of
its textual corruption, the unreliability of its historical
narratives, the crudeness of its style, and, in some cases, the
fanciful, even childish quality of its stories. It was, to many
elites, a book no longer worth believing. Richard Popkin has argued
persuasively that skepticism toward the Bible had its roots in an
intellectual crisis provoked by prolonged, unresolved theological
disputes about how to guarantee the truth of Catholic and Protestant
hermeneutics.2
The harsh and violent realities of religious division in the
centuries following the Reformation featured sharp criticisms of
traditional belief, on the one hand, and intensification of
confessional interpretation and polemical theology on the other. What
developed in the mid-eighteenth century was not a new awareness of
the “human” or “historical” character of the
Bible. Rather, it was the realization that the Bible was no longer
intelligible as scripture, that is, as a self-authorizing, unifying
authority in European culture. Its only meanings were confessional
meanings: Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed.

If the Bible were to
find a place in a new political order committed to the unifying power
of the state, it would have to do so as a common cultural
inheritance. This was the great insight of German academics working
at new and renewed institutions during the age of Enlightenment
university reform. They mastered and activated the older
scholarship—by then two centuries’ worth of philological,
text-critical, and antiquarian learning—in an effort to embed
the Bible in a foreign, historical culture. In this way, they
introduced a historical disjunction that allowed them to operate on
the Bible as an inert and separated body of tradition. They used
historical research to write the Bible’s death certificate
while opening, simultaneously, a new avenue for recovering the
biblical writings as ancient cultural products capable of reinforcing
the values and aims of a new sociopolitical order. The Bible, once
decomposed, could be used to fertilize modern culture.

In the eighteenth
century, biblical scholars at the university sought to recover a
universal or catholic Bible, one capable of fostering cultural
and social unity. At the university the moribund confessional Bible
was reconstituted in academic form. The political goals of the German
Enlightenment had a strong academic reflex: many universities were
created or remade at this time expressly to serve the interests of
the state. German universities still retained confessional identities
and vestiges of their ecclesial origins. Yet these confessional
identities and the theological faculties traditionally associated
with reinforcing them were deliberately suppressed in this period.
The goal was to produce rational, tolerant, and tasteful men capable
of serving in the churches and governments of progressive rulers in
Germany’s territories, kingdoms, and electorates.

Scholars like
Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791) of Göttingen succeeded in
creating frames of reference that allowed professors and students to
engage the Bible and employ interesting frameworks not dependent on
religious identity. In the broadest terms, Michaelis’s project
was to remake biblical Israel into a classical civilization. There
was a great deal of pressure on university professors as employees of
the state to contribute to the intellectual and social development or
Bildung of their students by modeling a rational, irenic,
pragmatic, and civic-minded appropriation of traditional culture. By
this light, biblical Israel seemed musty, traditional, and
benighted, a theological figment belonging to Judaism and orthodox
Lutheranism; but classical Israel as Michaelis envisioned it
seemed new and promising, a scholarly creation that could secure a
place for the Bible in modern, post-confessional culture.

To create a
classical Israel, Michaelis did three things. He severed it from
traditional Judaism and confessional Christianity. Michaelis, for
example, insisted on the deadness of the Hebrew language, denying its
continuity with rabbinic Judaism and refuting the linguistic
exceptionalism of Christian Hebraists. Michaelis formalized a program
for Hebrew study that relied on comparative use of Arabic, Syriac,
and Ethiopic and imported scientific standards from the study of
Greek and Latin. Second, relying on the work of Robert Lowth,
Michaelis used the invented concept of biblical poetry to recover the
Bible as an anthology of sublime classical literature. In this way,
he created a radically new frame of reference for interpretation. The
point of contact between biblical poetry and the interpreter was not
loyalty to a canon and community of faith but rather one’s
faculties of aesthetic judgment. Finally, in the area of biblical
law, Michaelis denied the theological normativity of the Bible,
claiming that “God never meant [the Mosaic law] to bind any
other nation but the Israelites.”3
In his 1770-1775 six-volume magnum opus Mosaisches Recht,
Michaelis offered philosophical and historical analysis of biblical
laws that characterized Moses as an ancient legislative genius.
Biblical laws became sources of information about the ancient world
and contemporary resources for political philosophy. But they ceased,
in any traditional sense, to function as laws.

The growth and
unification of ancillary disciplines like ethnography, legal history,
comparative Semitics, textual science, and biblical poetics
constitute the durable legacy of Michaelis and his eighteenth-century
cohort. Anyone who has studied the Bible at a modern university will
recognize the success of their methodological achievements. In this
period, the study of the Bible found a new home in the philosophical
faculty. Theologia exegetica became “biblical studies.”
The university became the host of a new interpretive mode that, at
the time, seemed as rigorous, coherent, and totalizing as traditional
and confessional modes had been for centuries. The scattered
researches of earlier skeptics and free-thinkers, though every bit as
critical, did not coalesce into a compelling interpretive program
until unified at the university. Guided by methods and assumptions
that reinforced the statism and irenicism of the Enlightenment
cameralists, the new discipline of biblical studies allowed
practitioners to create a post-confessional Bible by
reconstructing a pre-confessional Israel.

Academic
Criticism Today

Modern
biblical criticism is not a rival to the kind of religious faith once
invested in confessional Bibles; it is a successor to it. Though we
are in the unfortunate habit of equating biblical studies with
“historical criticism,” a long view of the modern
enterprise shows that its principal task was the post-confessional
management of the Bible’s cultural authority—not the
scientific analysis of its historical contexts. As the scholars of
the German Enlightenment knew, this form of management not only
preserved the academic integrity of biblical studies as a discipline,
it allowed critics to commend the cultural authority of the Bible in
an irenic way. In the two centuries following the Reformation, men
loyal to their confessional identities and their Bibles tore Europe
apart. It is not difficult to see why irenicism was an urgent matter
in the eighteenth century. Nor is it hard to understand why, in a
treatise on the social role of universities, Michaelis recommended
the use of critical scholarship to inoculate the German territories
against fanaticism and religious violence.

Biblical
studies is, at present, still
a cultural and social project, one that exists principally as an
alternative to traditional and confessional modes of biblical
interpretation. John Collins of Yale, the eminent historical critic,
has made precisely this point. In a presidential address to the
Society of Biblical Literature, he suggested that biblical critics
can help stem religious violence by “noting the diversity of
viewpoints in the Bible” in order to “relativize the more
problematic ones.”4
In doing so, scholars prevent readers from adopting any settled
convictions about what the Bible actually says. In this way, the
critic can demonstrate to any true believers ready to take up the
sword that “certitude” about the meaning of the Bible is
merely an “illusion.”5
More recently, Collins assessed the relation of postmodernism to
modern biblical criticism.6
By arguing that postmodern interpretive strategies can be fully
assimilated to modern biblical criticism, Collins aims to redeem the
discipline from irrelevance and defend it from methodological
supersessionism. In his judgment, postmodern interpretation is only
an extension of historical criticism, despite the fact that
postmodernists programmatically deny the objectivity, knowability,
and truthfulness of history. Postmodern criticism and historical
criticism are ultimately compatible, in Collins’s view, because
the real
value of historical criticism is its usefulness in structuring a
nonconfessional mode of discourse. As Collins says, the “historical
focus has been a way of getting distance from a text, of respecting
its otherness.” It allows “participants” to
structure a “conversation” about the Bible according to
academic rules.7
Postmoderns may ignore, deny, or even demonize historical research,
but their methods are just as useful in structuring academic
conversations. As a result, Collins concludes, they are an asset to
“historical criticism.”

What
is left of Collins’s method after this engagement with
postmodernism is not really historical
criticism but rather academic criticism. The point here is not to
denigrate Collins’s maneuver but rather to benefit from the
astute observations behind it. After all, the realization that
questions of social location and the politics of inquiry are actually
the most urgent ones in contemporary “historical criticism”
is a genuine and important insight. It is helpful to realize,
furthermore, that these political and moralistic concerns comport
nicely with postmodern critiques of conventional scholarship.

With
the recent pronouncements of Collins (and the realities to which they
point), we have moved beyond the “historical” nineteenth
century and returned, I believe, to the “cultural-political”
eighteenth. Biblical scholars at the Enlightenment university were
employees of the state charged with creating a way of studying the
Bible that would allow it to nourish a common life on new principles.
Academic criticism not only generated new interpretive frameworks, it
also located the study of the Bible in a new place—the
philosophical faculty of the university—and gave it a useful
social purpose—the
reinforcement of religious irenicism. Scholars revivified the Bible
in order to enrich and shore up a social and cultural order based on
a generic, progressive Protestantism. Like these scholars’,
Collins’s principal academic interest is ultimately a moral
one. He wants to protect a version of academic freedom and to fight
fundamentalism by using scholarship to defeat religious certitude. It
is not surprising, then, that Collins sees himself as an heir, most
of all, of the Enlightenment.

A
Return to First-Order Questions

A
clear understanding of the history of modern criticism has important
implications for the study of the Bible today: its aims, contexts,
and, indeed, its future. It turns, I believe, on the way that the
problematic relation between the scriptural Bibles of traditional
Judaism and Christianity on the one hand and the academic Bible
created and managed by scholars on the other is ultimately
negotiated. Too often they are taken, unhelpfully, as symbols of
stale antitheses between reason and faith, history and revelation,
the secular and the sacred. The history of modern biblical criticism,
however, shows that the fundamental antitheses were not intellectual
or theological, but rather social, moral, and political. Academic
critics did not dispense with the authority of a Bible resonant with
religion; they redeployed it in a distinctive form that has run both
parallel and perpendicular to churchly appropriations of the Bible.

Fundamentalism
and religious violence can have baneful effects. Scholarship no doubt
has a role to play in thinking carefully about how to understand and
address them. The question, though, is whether the kind of social and
cultural mandate described by Collins and embodied in modern
criticism is fully adequate for our time. It made sense to work
against certitude in an age of superabundant belief, to prune
critically the wild outgrowths of religious commitment, and to manage
the cultural authority of a Bible threatening to undo the social
order.

But
in our time, an age of low biblical literacy, diminished belief, and
weakened religious commitment, there is less and less cultural
authority for biblical scholars to manage—and, therefore, less
reason for those still interested in the Bible to pay close attention
to them. Those setting out on a journey look for guides not
policemen. First-order questions now bear explicit examination. The
question today is not ‘What is the real
cultural valence of the Bible I grew up with?’ but rather,
after the decline of Christendom and the long, slow deconversion of
elite culture in the West, “Why have a Bible at all?”

To
this question theologians no doubt have differing answers. Historical
critics, I fear, have no answer at all. As Max Weber said in his
lecture on science as a vocation “academic prophecies can only
ever produce fanatical sects, but never a genuine community.”8
Theologians working within their traditions serve genuine communities
of faith. Academic criticism, though, was created to form a new,
post-confessional community united by faith in the state. If Weber is
right, then the social ambition of the modern critical project has
largely failed: Wissenschaft
cannot sustain a genuine community because, unlike traditional
religious belief, it cannot decide what is ultimately worthwhile for
us to know. It can only clarify what we want
to know. To quote Weber once again: one must either “endure the
fate of the age like a man or return to the welcoming and merciful
embrace of the old churches.”9
Whether belief in the old churches is as comfortable and quiescent as
Weber thinks, I am not entirely sure. But I believe he is surely
right to insist that, whatever else one does, he had better do it
with absolute integrity.

8
Max Weber, The Vocation
Lectures: “Science as a Vocation”; “Politics as a
Vocation”. Edited
and with an introduction by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong.
Translation by Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 30.

Comments (3)

Is this to say that there is no point in looking at the Bible unless one has, and is not prepared to question, the dogmas of a religious organisation?
That to hold an eirenic viewpoint, claiming that the Bible does in some ways reflect different points of view, is to show primary concern for the avoidance of religious conflict, therefore for the integrity of the wider community, therefore for worship of the state?
That this attitude cannot explain why the Bible is important?
That an eirenic rather than dogmatic approach is in some way morally damaging? That a dogmatic approach is in some way morally elevating and what the world needs?

#1 - Martin Hughes - 10/01/2010 - 09:41

I have to admit I share Martin's uncertainty about what this article is saying, largely because I find the language impenetrably idiosyncratic. How else explain the use of a historically grotesque oxymoron like "liberal fundamentalists"?

#2 - CM - 10/04/2010 - 17:32

I sometimes consider myself a sceptical fundamentalist, in that I think that the Bible is the most important by far of all texts and needs to be studied in purity of heart, in a scientific spirit and without prejudice. This is exceedingly important as a way of stopping the disastrous impact of religious hostility on the world. Dr. Legaspi's views seem to me to reject all that in this context I hold dear, but I can't be sure that I'm getting the hang of his argument and don't want to speak in emotionally charged terms of his views until I'm clearer as to what they are.

#3 - Martin Hughes - 10/05/2010 - 12:57

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